introduction: the clinical and paraclinical characteristics of patients with congestive heart failure (chf) have been described by a number of previous studies, but very little information is available on this issue in iran. this study aimed to delineate the clinical and paraclinical characteristics of iranian patients hospitalized with chf. methods: during an observational, analytical, descrip...

The authors present the Minnesota Heart Failure Criteria (MHFC), derived using latent class analysis from widely available items in the Framingham Criteria. The authors used 1995 and 2000 data on hospitalized Minnesota Heart Survey subjects discharged after myocardial infarction or heart failure (N = 7,379). Selected Framingham Criteria variables (dyspnea, pulmonary rales, cardiomegaly, interst...

Congestive heart failure (CHF) definitions vary across epidemiologic studies. The Framingham Heart Study criteria include CHF signs and symptoms assessed by a physician panel. In the Cardiovascular Health Study, a committee of physicians adjudicated CHF diagnoses, confirmed by signs, symptoms, clinical tests, and/or medical therapy. The authors used data from the Cardiovascular Health Study, a ...

OBJECTIVE Early detection of Heart Failure (HF) could mitigate the enormous individual and societal burden from this disease. Clinical detection is based, in part, on recognition of the multiple signs and symptoms comprising the Framingham HF diagnostic criteria that are typically documented, but not necessarily synthesized, by primary care physicians well before more specific diagnostic studie...

BACKGROUND Validity of Heart Failure (HF) diagnoses from administrative records has not been extensively evaluated, especially with respect to small / unselected hospitals. OBJECTIVES To determine the positive predictive value of a primary / most responsible diagnosis of HF among a general population of subjects discharged from Saskatchewan hospitals. METHODS Using administrative health rec...

BACKGROUND Obesity is associated with numerous metabolic complications such as diabetes mellitus type 2, dyslipidemia, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases and several forms of cancer. Our goal was to compare different criteria to define the metabolically healthy obese (MHO) with metabolically unhealthy obese (MUHO) subjects. We applied Wildman (W), Wildman modified (WM) with insulin resistanc...

BACKGROUND Four large trials have shown cholesterol-reduction therapy to be effective for primary prevention of coronary heart disease (CHD). METHODS To determine the generalizability of these trials to a community-based sample, we compared the total cholesterol and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) distributions of patients in the 4 trials with those of Framingham Heart Study subj...

BACKGROUND Accurately identifying heart failure (HF) patients from administrative claims data is useful for both research and quality of care efforts. Yet, there are few comparisons of the various claims data criteria (also known as claims signatures) for identifying HF patients. We compared various HF claim signatures to assess their relative accuracy. METHODS In this retrospective study, we...

BACKGROUND The American Heart Association has established criteria for the evaluation of novel markers of cardiovascular risk. In accordance with these criteria, we assessed the association between a multi-locus genetic risk score (GRS) and incident coronary heart disease (CHD), and evaluated whether this GRS improves the predictive capacity of the Framingham risk function. METHODS AND RESULT...

The role of the amino-terminal fragment of probrain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) in monitoring the clinical status of outpatients with chronic heart failure has not yet been fully established. Fifty-nine patients with chronic heart failure were followed up at an outpatient clinic. The serum NT-proBNP level was measured and clinical status was assessed according to New York Heart Association ...